Business Ethics Links 7-22-2016 The Verbal Judo Edition

“There’s so many times when people are screaming and yelling and you just go to them: ‘Hey, buddy, how you doing? My names’s Sergeant Francis, I’m with NYPD, I noticed that you’re really upset, now what’s going on with you, is there any way I can help?’” he said. “What’s the expression on your face, what’s the tone of your voice? A lot of it has to do with keeping yourself calm. We have to have some sort of a professional language to use, and that’s what verbal judo really supplies.”

I do not pity the 68 Russian athletes who put the appeal in. I pity the athletes who were cheated out of the success they deserved, the athletes who lost their moment on the podium as well as the financial rewards, and have suffered from the continual self-doubt that they just weren’t good enough.

Yeah, this is sports where we send our children to build character and with a little luck permanently harm their bodies through injury or in some cases officially sanctioned drugs. I’m still waiting for the evidence of character building I’ve been hearing about for my entire life. (I have no problem with the no money sports where both adults and children compete for the love of simple athletics and the joy of movement.)

Twice in its history the United States has been forced to re-create itself, both times in the face of existential crises. The abolition of slavery was the first such re-creation, born out of the crisis of the civil war. The New Deal was the second, the formation of the modern welfare state in response to the crisis of the Great Depression; had Roosevelt acted any less radically, the profound unrest that in certain places had already flared into outright insurrection – an episode of US history that’s largely forgotten, or ignored – might well have morphed into re-creation by other means. Now we find ourselves in dire need of a third re-creation, a revolution in the psyche as well as the structure of the country that takes account of realities that are already upon us. A broadening beyond the psychic island, the insane castle, the encircling wall of the Wasp that Norman Mailer wrote about nearly a half-century ago. It has to happen; the country’s changing demographics, and the sheer weight of human experience they represent, demand it. The only way it won’t happen is by the outright subversion of democracy, which by definition would constitute a very different sort of re-creation.

Adilson Batista Almeida, the leader of Camorim Quilombo, accuses developers of riding roughshod over the history of slavery in the area by destroying archaeological remains at the site of an old sugar mill, and depriving the community of a public space for cultural activities that celebrate its Afro-Brazilian heritage.

“One Sunday morning a chainsaw came and devastated everything including century-old trees,” Almeida said. “I regard the ground as sacred because it is where my ancestors were buried.”

The media village is a condominium – Grand Club Verdant – that will be sold to private buyers after the Games. The land was acquired in 2013 by the real estate developer Cyrela which felled hundreds of trees, destroyed a community football pitch and demolished the remains of the old slave owner’s house and the slavery-era sugar mill in order to clear the area for construction.

On Thursday, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation banning the “tampon tax” – a tax on menstruation products. The measure was approved by the state senate and assembly earlier this year.

“Women statewide will no longer be burdened by a lingering tax that was levied at a time when women were not part of government and the decision-making process,” said Linda B Rosenthal, the bill’s sponsor in the state assembly.

The legislation will exempt tampons, sanitary napkins and panty liners from state and local taxes. It will go into effect in the next sales tax quarter, reported the Associated Press.

When these kinds of products are designated what they are – necessities, and no longer designated as luxuries, we will have taken a step in recognizing the facts of women’s lives rather than the systematic foolishness of old men. jp

“While we are glad to see Roger Ailes step down from his position at Fox News, sending him off with zero accountability and a big check is a slap in the face to the … women he harassed during his tenure as CEO and does nothing to fundamentally change the culture of Fox News that he created,” Nita Chaudhary, co-founder of UltraViolet, a national women’s advocacy organization, said in a statement.

Evidence of human-made climate change is so conclusive that it’s wrong for journalists to treat its denial like a reasonable point of view. But it is a new low for major media groups to sell their brand to lobbyists and let climate truthers go unchallenged.

And The Atlantic was hardly alone. At the Republican National Convention, the American Petroleum Institute also paid the Washington Post and Politico to host panel conversations where API literature was distributed, API representatives gave opening remarks, and not one speaker was an environmentalist, climate expert, scientists, or Democrat.